March 7, 2013

"It is believed that survivors from three waves of migration still live in the country. The first is described by anthropologists as people of the Veddo-Australoid type, who arrived from the north and west at least 42,000 years ago.... Around 3000 BC, a second migration brought Melanesians. The earlier Veddo-Australoid peoples withdrew at this time to the mountainous interior. Finally, proto-Malays arrived from south China and north Indochina...."East Timor, today's "History of" country.

I would imagine that early humans knew that an island, or land mass was over the horizon of the ocean because of the smell of smoke when the wind was from that direction. That's how I would have figured it out.

So East Timor was another Portuguese imperial remnant? It's faintly astounding how these remote, isolated fragments of Portuguese authority - Goa, Macau, and, apparently, East Timor - survived for four centuries after Portugal's brief day in the imperial sun.

It sounds like the Ford Administration was the end of the anti-colonial moment, at the same time it was its culmination. The invasions of East Timor and Northern Cyprus, the beginning of the Lebanese Civil War, the fall of Saigon and the fall of the monarchy of Ethiopia - like a spasm, a death-rattle of the last remnants of European empire, and the anti-colonialists turning on one another almost instantaneously.